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Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports
Coach Prime’s first season was not a failure by any means.
In three days, the Inaugural Prime Season will be over. There are no bowl games, award ceremonies, or press conferences where he ranks his kids on the horizon. After Saturday, it’s just ‘cruitin szn, which feels like an especially boring use of your time when you remember that [whispers] their class doesn’t look super great right now and [stops whispering] CU has the third-best women’s basketball team in the country. It’s hard to decide what’s a bigger bummer: the overwhelming apathy that’s settled in around Folsom Field, or the fact that, after such an electric start, the Buffs will once again finish dead last in the Pac-12. (Although in a way, it’s a fitting tribute.)
There are plenty of post mortems on the way, and the guess here is that a fair amount of them will scream about WHAT WENT WRONG WITH THE BUFFS’ ONCE-PROMISING SEASON. Local stations will do their final standups in front of the Flatirons, The Athletic will have one of their Brooklyn-based writers swoop in for a weekend, and Clay Travis will post some dopey video with the absolute worst editing you’ve ever seen and 312 views about Coach Prime being a fraud. It’s all as predictable as it is boring, and it’s all as boring as it is inaccurate. This year’s season didn’t go off the rails – ultimately, it ended up exactly where it was always going in the first place.
In fact, I’d argue that there were really only two capital-b Bad losses this year. The first was Stanford, which feels pretty obvious – outside of the fact that the Buffs would be heading into this weekend’s game still eligible for a bowl berth if they had won, Stanford just really sucks. Their only other wins were against Washington State (sigh) and Hawaii. If any sign of incremental progress was the goal this year, beating the second-worst team in the Pac-12 at home felt like a good place to start. They were one of the few teams that CU had an obvious talent advantage over, and fumbling a four-touchdown halftime lead is the type of loss that you can only get away with a handful of times. It was also the perfect get-right opportunity for a banged-up team that had just barely escaped Arizona State with a win and was heading into a bye week. Instead, it kicked off a never-ending skid of losing and in-house coaching drama – not to mention a few nervy days of Texas A&M rumors.
The other was Washington State. On the surface, there’s some nobility in that loss – night games in Pullman are no joke, and the Cougs had a few early season wins that make their record look respectable. But not unlike Stanford, they also pretty obviously suck. And the Buffs barely showed up. It was 42-7 before most people even remembered they were on TV, and while it’s hard to say the whole team quit when Travis Hunter is out there getting hurt on pointless deep throws late in the game, they’re probably not beating the allegations anytime soon. Their season was quite literally on the line, and they played one their worst games of the year. Rumor has it that if you listened hard enough, and that Palouse wind was blowing just the right way, you could basically hear the Mortal Kombat voice yelling FINISH HIM for most of the second half.
Seasons aren’t failures just because you lose two wacky Pac-12-After Dark Friday night games, and there’s plenty of legitimacy behind other reasons for the Buffs’ downfall. In case you weren’t a lineman expert, now you know how impossible it is to play well, or at all, with bad ones. It’s truly wild to think about how many season previews, mine included, talked about how the running backs were going to be a real strength of this team. And while Shedeur Sanders at 90% is still transcendent, Shedeur Sanders at 50% is, uh, less so.
They were a super-exciting, super-flawed team that beat two very-mid non-conference opponents before playing one of the most exciting games of the year on national television. The Big Regression was right there, staring us all in the face the whole time. Winning four games in a season is pretty sweet when you’re used to, you know, winning one. And of course people are going to be smug about the losses; that’s just life on the internet.
Even with the roster uncertainty, and the recruiting hiccups, I bet anyone with a stake – emotional or otherwise – in the football team is pretty stoked about what’s coming next season. And maybe, if they’re lucky, that includes beating Stanford.
by camellis
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